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34 conflict with town officials They have imprisoned him in shackles. —doña maría de busto A t about the same time that Licentiate Ramírez de Sierra was conducting his inspection in Cazalla de la Sierra, there was trouble in nearby Constantina. When the Count of Villar sent Bachiller Miguel Díaz there, on 20 March, to replace the deceased Dr. Centurio, he had stipulated his salary at forty reales a day, including travel time. The new physician arrived in Constantina around 1 April and began to treat the sick. The governor had charged the local council with paying the surgeon from the town’s own treasury, but Díaz complained repeatedly that he had not been paid and that the officials wanted to reduce his salary. About a month and a half after the surgeon arrived in Constantina, his wife, Doña María de Busto, petitioned the count on her husband’s behalf. She claimed on 15 May that since her husband had been away he had not collected anything for his services from the town of Constantina.“They have imprisoned him in shackles,” she lamented, “and are otherwise mistreating him, trying to kill him at all costs.” Doña María charged that the officials were intimidating her husband so that he would stop asking for payment, and she begged the governor to send a constable to Constantina to exercise justice and ensure that her husband was properly paid. Doña María included a petition to the count that her husband had penned in Constantina on 8 May. Miguel Díaz complained that he was not receiving his daily salary, and he accused the officials of “planning to forcefully drive me out of the said town, all with the end to be able to say that I had left for a better place without curing the sick.” The Count of Villar responded by ordering Constantina’s officials to pay the surgeon immediately, and he also mandated the town’s chief justice, Licentiate Francisco González Perellón, to set free the beleaguered physician. 258 | the plague files The count’s order reached Constantina on 18 May and elicited an immediate response. Constantina’s officials defended themselves, stating that the accusations were false and insisting that they had not mistreated or imprisoned the surgeon. They counterattacked, alleging that Miguel Díaz had committed “crimes” in the town and that he intimidated his poor patients. They accused the physician of blackmailing the plague-stricken poor,“threatening them that if they do not pay him, regardless that he is collecting the salary, he would have to take them to the hospital.” Furthermore, they claimed, he told these defenseless patients that he would “expose and display them before a notary so that they would be taken to the said hospital.” The pesthouses, set up by municipal officials with the best of intentions to cure the poor sick, struck terror in the popular mind, and the threat of being removed to them could apparently be used to coerce people. These hospitals were often overcrowded, dirty, and smelly places where many patients died after being subjected to painful remedies. The following day Constantina’s officials claimed that they had paid the surgeon the six hundred reales (about fifty-five ducats) he was owed and that indeed he had collected more than two hundred ducats,“which they have been forced to allow for,”and they insisted that they should not have to pay him anything else. As soon as Miguel Díaz learned of the accusations against him, he went to see the chief justice, Licentiate González Perellón. The surgeon stated that the claim that he had received a payment of two hundred ducats was untrue , and he stressed that he had cured the poor “without any profit, instead if they wanted to give it to me, I did not take it.”“I do not remember what the rich gave me,” he added, though he conceded that he might have received “just two or three baby goats,” but he insisted that they gave them to him “of their own will without me asking for them.” Miguel Díaz felt so certain in his righteousness that he demanded a public proclamation in the principal plaza of Constantina on Sunday, asking anyone who had been sick and had paid the surgeon to step forward and denounce him. The chief justice accepted the challenge...

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